Bolsonaro wins Brazil election, promises to purge leftists from country

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Associate Professor, Graduate School of International and Area Studies, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies

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Helder Ferreira do Vale does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Jair Bolsonaro, a 63-year-old congressman who had strong evangelical backing for his law-and-order stance on policing, support for gun rights and opposition to abortion, won 55 percent of votes. Bolsonaro’s leftist competitor, Fernando Haddad, a former education minister and ex-mayor of São Paulo, received 45 percent of the roughly 100 million ballots cast.

Bolsonaro’s angry, populist campaign rhetoric led many newspapers and public figures worldwide to declare his candidacy a threat to democracy. But 57.8 million Brazilians on Sunday showed less concern about Bolsonaro’s message.

In such circumstances, Bolsonaro’s win as an anti-establishment candidate was predictable – and not just because Bolsonaro had maintained a clear lead in the polls ever since Lula withdrew in September.

When voters don’t believe in their politicians or government institutions, candidates who tap into voter disdain for the political system can find success. In my scholarly research on democratization, this is what I call the “politics of disillusionment.”

Now, disillusionment in Brazil has handed victory to a right-wing populist who promises to purge the country of his leftist opponents.

“Either they go overseas, or they go to jail,” he told a huge crowd in São Paulo in one of his last appearances before Sunday’s vote.

Inflammatory rhetoric and militarism

Bolsonaro has been in Congress for three decades. But to harness popular rage against the system, his campaign offered an outsider’s scathing critique of Brazilian society.

In response to rampant political corruption and extreme violence in Brazil, Bolsonaro defended military dictatorships like the one that ran Brazil from 1964 to 1985. The only problem with Brazil’s former authoritarian leaders, Bolsonaro said, was that they “tortured rather than killed” dissenters.

To tackle record-high crime, the president-elect has said he will ease gun laws and reduce the age of criminal responsibility from 18 to 16. He is a staunch proponent of restarting the death penalty in Brazil, saying he would “volunteer to kill those on death row” himself.

He considers abortion to be murder. The procedure is banned in Brazil, but in recent years women’s groups have been pushing to liberalize abortion laws. That is unlikely to happen under Bolsonaro.

Some analysts have suggested that Congress may rein in Bolsonaro’s more radical tendencies. But evidence from the United States and elsewhere suggests that in the politics of disillusion, presidents who campaign as extremist govern as extremists.

Bolsonaro takes office on Jan. 1. Brazil’s political institutions, already weakened by corruption and public outrage, will face great pressure to show that they can withstand the new president’s populist ambitions and militaristic instincts.

It is a daunting challenge for Brazil’s young and, I fear, faltering democracy.

The divisive right-wing Brazilian presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro, seen in here on a campaign poster, is often likened to Donald Trump. Some supporters take pride in the comparison.
Reuters/Ricardo Moraes